The Editor Who Taught Me to Stay
On the eve of EEW Magazine’s 19th anniversary, a publisher speaks across 178 years to the man who showed her what faithful endurance looks like.
By Dianna Hobbs | EEW Magazine Online
A portrait of Frederick Douglass is composited against the masthead of The North Star, Vol. I, No. 28, dated June 2, 1848 — six months into publication. Photo illustration: EEW Magazine. Source materials: Library of Congress.
Some people inherit mentors they can call on the phone. Mine has been dead for 130 years.
For nearly two decades, through every season of building an independent Christian media ministry that sometimes felt too heavy to carry, I found myself returning to Frederick Douglass. Not simply to admire him. To remember what faithful endurance looks like. To remind myself that this road has been walked before, by someone who had far less than I have and built something the Library of Congress now holds in more than 575 digitized issues.
In 2019, a traumatic brain injury took portions of what I once knew. Parts of my scholarly life, things I had read and studied and inhabited over decades, went dark. Frederick Douglass did not. He was still there. I take that as something more than coincidence.
This July, Empowering Everyday Women Online Magazine completes its 19th year. In November, I turn 50. The publication’s 20th anniversary is just over the horizon. As I approach that mark, I keep returning to the same man, the same story, the same desk in Rochester, New York.
Rochester sits just east of where I live in Western New York, along the same Erie Canal corridor Douglass's generation traveled. From that desk, a formerly enslaved man with no formal education and considerable debt decided that the truth required a vehicle. He would build one himself.
The North Star first appeared on December 3, 1847. Douglass had spent two years touring Britain, Ireland, and Scotland to raise the startup funds.
The first issue of The North Star, published December 3, 1847, in Rochester, New York. The lead editorial, "Our Paper and Its Prospects," laid out the founding mission of what would become more than 16 years of continuous independent Black publishing across three titles. Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division.
He relocated his family to Rochester over the pointed objections of his mentor, the prominent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison believed a Black-owned independent press was unnecessary and would fracture the movement. Douglass heard all of it and proceeded.
The paper was four pages, published weekly, and sold for $2 per year. Publishing costs ran approximately $80 per week, more than subscription revenue could reliably cover. Within the first year, Douglass mortgaged his home to keep the press running. He returned to the lecture circuit on top of his editorial duties to close the gap. He ran the paper while corresponding with readers on two continents and raising a family. Through all of it, he remained one of the most recognizable figures in the American abolitionist movement.
He would not be talked out of it. He would not be bought out of it. He would not be worn out of it.
Across the masthead, Douglass printed a motto that was theological before it was political. It declared that “right is of no sex—truth is of no color— and God is the Father of us all, and all we are bretheren.”
The masthead motto of The North Star as it appeared in the original newspaper, published by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, beginning December 3, 1847. Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division.
The newspaper was launched by a preacher. After his escape from slavery in September 1838, by June 1839, Douglass had become a licensed minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The oratorical gifts he developed in that congregation were the same gifts the lecture halls of two continents eventually borrowed. Faith was not incidental to what he built. It was the engine.
He drew a line in print that every Christian journalist since has had to reckon with. In the appendix to his Narrative, Douglass wrote: "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
He was defending the faith from the inside, the way a prophet defends truth against those who distort it. He distinguished the Christianity of Christ from the religion being used to sanction human bondage, and he did it with the confidence of someone who had read the Book and understood the difference. Near the end of his life, he anchored his final public hope in "the broad foundation laid by the Bible itself, that God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth."
The Word governed him from first to last.
The North Star was no single-issue broadsheet. Douglass covered the California Gold Rush and the French constitution. He published excerpts from Charles Dickens's novels. He carried the speeches of Harriet Jacobs, who had escaped slavery herself and whose voice belonged in print. The paper ran book reviews, international correspondence, poetry, and practical counsel for free Black communities navigating civic life.
When the first Women's Rights Convention gathered at Seneca Falls in July 1848, Douglass attended. He was the only man present to rise and vote in favor of the Declaration of Sentiments demanding equality for women. His paper covered the convention, and the printed materials were produced at The North Star office.
He covered everything because he understood that the liberation of his people connected to everything. He refused to be assigned a lane. He was a Christian minister, a Black man, a writer, an editor, an intellectual, a political theorist, and a social critic. He would not lay one of those down to make another more comfortable for people who had already decided what he was supposed to be.
By 1851, financial pressure forced a merger with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper, and the publication became Frederick Douglass' Paper. The name changed. The voice did not. He remained editor. The formal break with Garrison followed. Douglass had concluded that the Constitution was a liberty document and that political engagement was the path to emancipation. He continued publishing through Douglass' Monthly and eventually the New National Era in Washington, D.C., running through 1874.
Frederick Douglass, photographed at Hillsdale College on January 21, 1863 — three weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect and more than 15 years into his career as an independent publisher. He was in the final months of publication of Douglass' Monthly, the third iteration of the independent press he launched with The North Star in 1847. Photo: Hillsdale College.
He published continuously for more than 16 years, across three titles, outlasting the Civil War, Reconstruction, and every prediction that he could not sustain it.
I started EEW Magazine in 2007, from a kitchen table in Delaware, where my husband and I had relocated for his work at a Philadelphia institution. I have been ordained and preaching since I was eleven years old.
This work is not something I chose because it seemed viable. It is something I was called to before I knew what it would cost.
There have been years when the weight of running an independent faith media operation settled into something that felt unsustainable. When the question stopped being strategic and became foundational.
Douglass answered those years in his own words at The North Star's founding: "Justice must be done, the truth must be told. I will not be silent."
That is a calling, not a media strategy.
Frederick Douglass, photographed in Philadelphia on April 26, 1870, by George Francis Schreiber. Douglass was in his early fifties and had recently launched the New National Era in Washington, D.C., the final title in more than two decades of independent Black publishing that began with The North Star in 1847. The month this portrait was taken, the 15th Amendment was ratified. Photo: Library of Congress.
He proved that a Bible-believing, Scripture-grounded Black Christian could also be a first-rate journalist, a political mind, a social critic, an intellectual, and a builder of institutions that outlast their builder. He carried both his faith and his full intellectual force at full height, without apology. Everything he produced bears the marks of that wholeness.
Christians can be all of that. I have believed it my whole life. I have tried to build something that demonstrates it.
I want the young African American women and men who feel the same pull toward this work to know they belong to a long tradition. A tradition that has always insisted faith and intellect belong together. A tradition that has made room, from its earliest days, for the full range of what a Black Christian voice can say and do and build.
Nineteen years from a kitchen table. One hundred and seventy-eight years from a press in Rochester.
The machinery has changed. The calling has not.
The star does not move. We find our way by it.
The complete archive of Frederick Douglass's newspapers, 1847 to 1874, is digitized and freely available through the Library of Congress Digital Collections. The first issue of The North Star, dated December 3, 1847, is among the holdings.
Dianna Hobbs is the founder and CEO of Empowering Everyday Women Ministries, Inc., and editor of EEW Magazine Online. She is an ordained minister and the host of the Daily Cup of Inspiration podcast.
